Golden Ending
by LunarCalluna
Summary: When Serge goes to Fort Dragonia to get his body back, he doesn't lose his way, he just finds a new one. Unfortunately, this new one doesn't involve getting his body back at all - whether he wants to or not - and that could make saving the timeline a little more difficult.


**Notes** : There are a few key changes and clarifications made to make Chrono Cross itself more compliant to its own established lore. Firstly, Lynx (aka Dark Serge) has an innate color of _white_ , not black; Serge (in Lynx's body) still has an innate color of black. I will also not be writing out everyone's accents in order to make the reading experience less awkward.

* * *

 **Chapter One: Where a Choice is Made**

* * *

The Dragon Tear was bizarrely lightweight, or at least it felt like it. The shards of the Tear from the other world somehow seemed heavier than the intact artifact Serge now carried, like the difference between carrying a sack of turnips versus something living. He supposed that the Dragon Tear may very well have been alive in some sense, if it could key into the wants and needs of the person activating it and "decide" how to handle them then it must have had some form of consciousness.

He wondered fleetingly if that meant the shattered tear—Steena called it a "tear of hate" for whatever reason—was dead.

"…The central chamber is already raised?" Steena queried with a blink as they stepped into the fort proper. Karsh looked equally curious, but just turned to Serge with one raised eyebrow.

He shrugged, stalking toward the double doors leading into the other room. "I came back not long after I got home," he explained; he spoke somewhat slowly, concentrating harder than he was used to, but his words were nonetheless clear. It had taken almost a month for him to finally figure out how to speak clearly through a mouth without proper lips and with what felt like too many teeth. "Harle thought it was worth checking out, but there was nothing here."

For the most part, Fort Dragonia had been completely deserted; quite different from the Fort in the other world, which had been crawling with Dragoons on patrol for their general and his beastly ambassadorial guest. Deactivating the crystals was exactly the same—but then, the structure was designed thousands of years before the split in the timelines, so there was no reason for anything to be different.

The doors slid open, revealing that this time around the Fort was most certainly not deserted. A young man, not even eighteen, sat on the dais in the middle of the room, one leg pulled up close to his chest while the other hung down toward the steps below.

Serge stopped, eyes narrowing as a growl rumbled from deep in his throat.

"Lynx," Karsh ground out, swinging the axe off his back in preparation. "To what do we owe the pleasure this time?"

Lynx—with the blue hair and large eyes and rich coppery tan that most certainly belonged to Serge and not him—just grinned and chuckled slightly. "Oh, I just wanted to see how far you'd be willing to go to get in my way." He slid off the platform and swung his scythe to balance on one shoulder, seemingly out of the ether. His eyes, bizarrely red instead of the violet Serge had inherited from his mother, cast over the small group for a moment before settling on Serge. "Where's Harle?"

The growl deepened slightly. "Wouldn't you like to know," he replied, words just this side of intelligible through the anger, belying the way his stomach clenched. Harle had been missing for weeks and he had a feeling that Lynx knew it.

The young man just chuckled again, shaking his head. "You have no idea what that girl is. I can sincerely promise that your merry little band is better off without her, and it seems that she finally realized she's better off without you."

Serge lunged forward instantly, Steena calling his name and Karsh moving just too slowly to stop him, and took a swing straight at Lynx's smug and painfully familiar face. In a flicker of gleaming white he was gone, leaving Serge's claw-tipped swipe to cut through empty air.

"Oh, relax," Lynx crooned from above, flickering back into existence overhead, several feet out of even Serge's reach. "It's far too late for you or her to make a difference." He tilted his head slightly, amused. "Nonetheless, we have so much to talk about—"

Something green sparked by the door, slicing through the air toward the body-thief above. One of the young man's arms jerked up in a show of reflex that left Serge sincerely impressed—as the person who actually owned that body, fully aware of its capabilities—and his raised hand shattered the spell on contact. Karsh was left dumbstruck on the floor below while Lynx regarded him with a look of obvious distaste.

"Was that really necessary?" Lynx sighed and shook his head, looking back to Serge as he lowered his hand. "Best of luck to you, Chrono Trigger. I look forward to seeing you in the Sea of Eden—hopefully you'll be in better company." In another of those gleaming white flickers, he was gone.

"Son of a bitch," Karsh ground through clenched teeth. "How the hell did he _do_ that? How the hell is he even _here_?" He may have had Serge's body, but he didn't have the amulet.

"From what I've been told," Steena replied, "this Lynx character is a being of great power on more than simply a physical level. A great deal of that power, it seems, is bound to his spirit rather than his body."

Serge gave a mirthless chuckle that sounded more like a growl. "Considering I can't do any of those things, I think that's obvious."

"Perhaps you simply need training," Steena offered.

He resisted the urge to shudder. "I don't intend to be wearing this body any longer than I have to, come on."

* * *

The rest of the trip through the fort was as uneventful as expected, with no words exchanged until the trio reached the chamber suspended on air high above the fort. Serge moved to push the doors open when Steena put one pale hand on the black leather of his sleeve.

"From here you must go alone."

"I definitely wasn't alone the last time," he replied, brow furrowed.

Steena shook her head slightly. "Think of the Dragon Tear as a writer. When Lynx stole your body, all it had to do was trade a few pages in each of your stories. This time, it must preserve those pages while rewriting everything around them."

Serge had never been particularly bad with magic, but the Dragonites obviously had a very different way of utilizing it. He hadn't really put a great deal of thought into what it would take to get his body back, especially considering he wouldn't be able to switch back with Lynx.

"Sounds time consuming," Karsh said, folding his arms. "And dangerous."

"Highly," was Steena's simple response, amber eyes darting momentarily to the Deva. "Listen to me, Serge, the Dragon Tear will rewrite whatever you need in this world based upon what is most important to you at the moment of its activation. Your sense of self must be paramount when you face the Tear, or you will fail." Her normally calm, even stoic expression had taken on an edge of obvious concern. "As you work through your story, you _cannot_ lose your way. Do you understand?"

Taking a deep breath, he clenched his jaw and nodded. She withdrew her hand and lowered her head slightly.

"Then you're ready."

Karsh clapped him on the shoulder. "Good luck, junior. Hopefully we'll be seeing you soon."

Again Serge just nodded, turning to push the doors open with both clawed hands and stepping into the low, cool light beyond. The doors swung shut behind him with a boom that made him flinch a little, fur rising down his spine and ears going completely flat automatically. He was definitely looking forward to getting rid of all that, it was hard to lie about how he felt when he had fur and ears and a tail—thankfully usually tucked away safely under his robe—that gave him away every time.

The circular room was identical to its twin in the other world, each of the six dragon statues seated on a ring of colored light, joined to the pedestal in the center like spokes on a wheel. Serge placed the Dragon Tear on the little platform, took a deep breath and waited. Steena had said this could be time-consuming…

A bloom of light to the right revealed one piece of a massive mural, faded and ancient but visible for probably the first time in centuries. The cracks in the colored stone obscured the image somewhat, but Serge couldn't have lived in El Nido for his entire life without recognizing the simple, stylized imagery for what it was: the ocean.

Blue light concentrated on the far side of the barely-glowing mural, forming a sparkling orb the size of Serge's fist that drifted slightly along the gentle curves of the ancient painting.

 _All life on this planet was born in the sea._ The voice was deep, almost guttural and oddly familiar. It reverberated through the chamber, seeming to originate from the orb of light. As it drifted, lighting up new portions of the mural as it moved, the blue glow wove a story that Serge was fairly certain humans had never heard before. Was it responding to him differently than it had General Viper because he was in a demihuman body?

The light spoke of the dawn of life on Gaea, ancient civilizations, the very people who created Fort Dragonia and the other Dragonite ruins, the ones who crafted the Einlanzer and then disappeared into antiquity with little to no explanation. According to this story, the greatest portion of their civilization had been brought down by an entity familiar in name if not in story.

 _That one was known as "Lavos!" The great crimson flame…_

Lavos—Norris had found some information on it during their journey through the Dead Sea, albeit very little. According to that, Lavos was some sort of parasite, a mass of spikes and death that slept deep in the earth, waiting to wake for some doubtless horrible purpose. It seemed that even in the future, records dated more than a thousand years forward in time, they still had very little idea of what it was.

According to this gleaming ghost of memory left in the only surviving Dragonian fortress in the world, Lavos was to thank for humanity existing in the first place. That wasn't what Serge had expected when he learned about it on the way through the Dead Sea.

He frowned, remembering Harle's apparent lack of surprise, the way she used words he didn't even understand—what did "download" even mean?—in an attempt to get Norris to bring up more information. She'd been so upset when the display went black, but Serge had been left with a feeling that she knew more about what they'd seen there than she let on.

Harle had always been like that, though, knowing so much more than she ever told anyone. She always seemed to have insider knowledge, power and understanding that was utterly unmatched even by Lynx on his mission to reclaim the Frozen Flame.

Serge missed her terribly.

The glow finished the story, drifting to the center of the room to settle in the Dragon Tear, dimming to create a low gleam in the heart of the relic. Serge looked down into it, remembering what Steena had said before; the Tear could rewrite anything, but it would only rewrite the thing that was most important to him in that moment. It could only follow the story that he was reading.

He thought back on the start of all this, falling through the sand and waking somewhere both close and further from home than he'd ever been. Talking to Leena, the hike up Cape Howl, politely declining Kid's offer to join him on whatever fool's errand he'd been drafted into. Termina, meeting Glenn and Guile; Viper Manor and meeting Lynx for the first time.

Fort Dragonia, where it all fell apart.

He took a breath and shook his head slightly. Why was it that every step of this journey required him to give up everything he'd gained in the process? He lost Leena the moment he fell through the rift between worlds—he couldn't even think of the Leena back home as _his_ Leena anymore, not after spending so much time traveling and fighting alongside the one from the other world. And then he lost her and all his other friends in Fort Dragonia when his body was stolen. Glenn, Leena, Kid, Guile, everyone he'd come to trust and rely on officially wanted absolutely nothing to do with him so long as he was a monster of fur and teeth.

And yet, while reclaiming his body wouldn't mean losing all the other friends and allies he'd made since then, it did quite clearly mean giving up the single most important person he'd met in this insane journey of his.

" _If you had to choose between the world or_ moi _,"_ she had asked, red eyes gleaming in the multicolored light of the Pearly Gates, _"which would you choose?"_ At the time, he'd looked back on everything so far and spoken from his heart—and she just smiled, thanked him and said she knew it was a lie.

Since she'd disappeared, the meaning of her question and response to his answer were clear: moving forward this time didn't require losing Harle, it required giving her up willingly.

This was the only way to move forward, the only way to catch up with Lynx in the Sea of Eden and stop him from completing his mission and…dooming the world, or whatever it was he was after. Honestly no one seemed to know what exactly he was doing, just that it was doubtless bad news.

But Serge had lost so many people already, how could he intentionally give up one who had come to mean more to him than any of the others who had been ripped away from him or abandoned him outright?

He looked up at the rough scarlet swirl of paint on the wall, Lavos, and wondered what else Harle knew about it, why she never told him anything. He wondered what it would take to get her back.

 _Your entreat to the gods has been heard._ The glow in the Dragon Tear flared again. _The Daughter of the Moon shall be brought to you._

Serge jerked slightly when the chamber began to shudder, rumbling as stone scraped on stone overhead. He looked up, shielding his eyes from bits of falling debris as the ceiling slowly…opened. Like a pupil dilating, the different sections of the dome overhead all twisted slightly to reveal a perfectly round patch of equally perfect blue sky.

The Dragon Tear was still glowing, light brightening to white instead of blue in the instant before a beam of light shot straight up from it and through the hole overhead, cutting into the sky like lightning pulled taut.

* * *

Elsewhere—in several elsewheres—six draconic figures rose and turned.

Somewhere amid the chaos of ice and drought—or perhaps flowing water and the graves of fairies—the Water Dragon intoned, "It is a summoning."

"Not for us," the Earth Dragon hissed through sand and stone.

The Green Dragon's voice was high and ragged, carrying easily through leaves and wind and air. "No, it is a summoning for _her_."

"This isn't part of the plan…" the Fire Dragon murmured through the heat of Mount Pyre.

"The Trigger has failed," came a rich, dark rumble from somewhere deep below, above or within the island of Marbule.

When the Sky Dragon finally joined the conversation, white-gold eyes rooted on the beam of light from across time and space, it was with obvious regret. "We did not account for the Trigger's emotions—or for hers."

The cascade of voices reverberated through the worlds, striking Steena—and Direa and the other Steena—to the core.

" _The child-moon has failed_."

* * *

The chamber was still shaking, although now it felt more like a pull toward the beam of light still shooting up to the sky above. The beam was slowly broadening to a column, wind whipping about the chamber as the light grew too bright even for Serge's slit pupils to handle. It hurt, burning the back of his eyes even with a hand raised and one eye finally clenched shut against the light and ears slanted back against the increasing howl of energy, but Serge couldn't force himself to look away.

Just as his vision started to burn out in the one open eye, just as Serge was sure he would be blinded for the rest of his life, the column shattered like glass, shards and sparks of light shooting out in all directions.

The figure that tumbled out from shattered light column was intimately familiar; Serge lunged forward to catch her before she could hit the stone floor.

"Harle!" He rumbled, dropping to his knees to pull her closer, cradling her head in one large clawed hand. She was shivering slightly, her hands ghosting up to clench on the flap of his cape. "Harle, are you all right? Where have you—" he stopped, leaning in closer even as he pulled her further up into his lap. "Have you been crying?"

The blue and red makeup painted around her eyes was smeared and streaked, and when she opened her huge scarlet eyes they shone with tears. "Oh, _mon_ Serge," she murmured, voice thick as she tilted her head to look past him, over his shoulder. "What have you done?"

Serge felt his entire body go cold as he turned to follow Harle's gaze to the pedestal in the center of the room, on which sat the shattered remains of the Dragon Tear.

"…Shit."


End file.
